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Why More Companies Don't Contribute To X.Org

11-27-2010, 10:00 AM

Phoronix: Why More Companies Don't Contribute To X.Org

Being brought up from the discussion surrounding the RadeonHD driver being vandalized, which wound up just being a prank by two X.Org developers to torment one of the former RadeonHD developers, was a discussion why more companies don't contribute back to X.Org. Do companies think the X.Org code is too hard? That it's not worth the time? Is it all politics?..

I've always gotten the impression that high-dollar open source is confined to what you can't see and CLI administration anyway. That is, why should they bother when they don't have a use for it?

But then again maybe I've missed the train entirely on X. It's always struck me as something confined to desktop Linux usage, and frankly desktop Linux isn't exactly a large commercial endeavor compared to any other commercial open source software.

Comment

joffe: Embedded systems are increasingly big business for open source software, and Xorg is often deployed in many classes of such devices. For example in set-top boxes, in-vehicle infotainment systems, personal navigation units, industrial consoles, mobile phones, et.c. Such usage will likely continue to increase in the coming years.

Comment

the question should probably be "How attractive is X as a "product" and what we must do in the future (with Wayland as it seems) in order to attract people/developers/companies in the open source graphics ecosystem"

the kernel has managed to do that (be attractive) but as it seems the graphics side of things hasn't managed to do the same

Comment

joffe: Embedded systems are increasingly big business for open source software, and Xorg is often deployed in many classes of such devices. For example in set-top boxes, in-vehicle infotainment systems, personal navigation units, industrial consoles, mobile phones, et.c. Such usage will likely continue to increase in the coming years.

I thought they mostly used different display packages for that? AFAIK Android doesn't use X - I don't think webOS does either, does it?

Comment

This question (why aren't more people working on X ?" comes up every year or so and the the discussion always ends up in more or less the same place :

developer : so what do you think would be done with X if we had more devs ?
user : problem A
developer : that's handled by another part of the graphics stack (typically kernel or mesa), not by X
user : problem B
developer : that's handled by another part of the graphics stack (typically kernel or mesa), not by X
user : problem C
developer : that's handled by another part of the graphics stack (typically kernel or mesa), not by X
...

Eventually someone comes along and provides a list of issues which *are* handled by X, and that list is usually pretty close to what the developers are working on already.

X is a network-extensible window system, and being network extensible brings a number of good and bad things, and most of the bad things can't be eliminated without getting rid of the embedded network protocol... but without the network extensibility it wouldn't be X.

The first thing that needs to be clarified is whether "contributing to X.org" really means "contributing to the graphics stack" or "contributing to X". Those two activities used to be largely the same (in the sense that most of the graphics driver work was done in the X drivers, which are part of X.org) but they stopped being the same quite a while ago with the advent of direct rendering and kernel modesetting.

Most of the graphics driver code now lives outside of X.org (ie the X drivers are a relatively smaller portion of the driver stack these days) and an increasing number of apps are being written in a way that won't work over the X wire protocol anyways... so the big question remains "assuming the developers were there, is there agreement on what X should become ?".

The answer seems to be a resounding "no", with roughly half of the responses saying that the network extensibility should be ditched to let the graphics stack be smaller, faster and more modern, while the other half of responses say that the network extensibility is the most important part of X and the key thing differentiating the Linux/Unix graphics stack from competing OSes.

It seems to me that the development community is responding pretty well to those conflicting requests -- working on a new/smaller/simpler graphics stack based on Wayland, while maintaining X in its current form to provide network extensibility and support for existing/legacy applications and ensuring that X will be able to run on top of the new/smaller/simpler stack.

There is quite a bit of work happening on the graphics stack in general... it's just that not a lot of it is happening on X itself.

There is a real problem in the sense that most of the X work is being done by a small group of people working really hard, which is not sustainable, so one of the priorities of the X community is providing improved/updated documentation in order to make it easier for new developers to join the effort.